"There wasn't anyone doing things like this when we started out," says Jesse Gallagher, Sunshine's remaining Boston rat. "There were different art scenes of kids doing things, but never like a house and bands and a label." The intimacy of the Whitehaus scene — Gallagher's New Black Magic Rainbow Quartet played there recently with no microphones — just makes it more vital. "It's nice to have people sitting and ready to pay attention like that," he goes on, "but it makes you realize that you better have something to say."

In the basement that Saturday night, kids sit on transplanted van seats and the concrete floor around Roe Enney, a solo noise girl from Brooklyn with a motley array of drums and multi-effects pedals who's intuiting her way through various loops and scratchy French-language instructional LPs. "My recorded stuff is a lot poppier than this," she tells me later. The free-form approach worked tonight, but that's no big surprise. If anything, the Haus has proven that everything goes.

"Our goal is just to make this an open zone," says Shaker. "To meet people and tell them they're doing great things."

Ghost stories For all of the excitement that surrounded Wilco on the Maine State Pier or Sufjan Stevens at Port City Music Hall or the various sold-out Ray LaMontagne shows of the past year, there is no question that last Sunday's Phish show at the Cumberland County Civic Center was the biggest thing to hit our fair city in a very long time.

Airman punk Perhaps the clearest sign that Afghanistan is not your father's war comes in the person of Airman First Class Peter Bourgeois, who, while deployed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, has been busy managing the career of his former band, Jodi Explodi.

Winged migration Since their start in the middle of the decade, Brown Bird have been one of the region's go-to chamber-folk outfits, with a couple of dark and stormy albums earning them a following in various nooks of New England. The release of their latest album, The Devil Dancing , feels like both an ending and a new beginning.

Injustice for all Scott Sturgeon loses his train of thought a couple of times during this interview. He's loopy from jet lag — which is unavoidable after a 20-hour flight from New Zealand (halfway around the planet from his non-residency at a squatted apartment building in New York City), where he's just finished a tour with his claim-to-fame band, Leftover Crack.

Wanting more After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.

Group hug Things aren’t always what they’re called — we know that flying fish don’t fly and starfish aren’t even fish.

Concertizing When I reach John Hollenbeck by phone, he's on a sojourn typical of the modern itinerant composer — a week-long teaching residency.

INTERVIEW: TALKING WITH MISSION OF BURMA'S ROGER MILLER | January 18, 2012 This weekend (January 20-21) brings a two-night stand at Brighton Music Hall for post-punk godfathers Mission of Burma, who have somehow morphed into a band that's equal parts internationally renowned throwbacks and prolific local underdogs.

TRYING TO FIND NOW | January 04, 2012 William Gibson — the writer who famously coined the term "cyberpunk" and whose classic tech-punk novels like Neuromancer and The Difference Engine helped spawn a couple generations' worth of bleak, busted fantasies — is now on tour promoting his first collection of nonfiction.

DENGUE FEVER ADD ECCENTRICITY TO PSYCH POP | June 01, 2011 For all the kitsch and B-movie flair of Dengue Fever, there are still a few aspects of their obsession with Cambodian pop that they haven't put on record.